A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: Fantasia 2000

Date Viewed: 4/22/00

Details:

Director: James Algar & Gaetan Brizzi

Score: 1/2

The Review:A mix of old and new, Fantasia 2000 for iMAX theaters is interesting, but not compelling. Some of the animation is quite good -- Respighi and the whales comes to mind -- but overall it is neither as novel nor as mind- blowing as the original. The most distracting and least appealing aspect is the continued reliance on human narrators, interspersed throughout the performance, interrupting with annoying, and sometimes inappropriate or downright inane, humor; these portions will not pass the test of time, as did the majority of the original Fantasia.

The introduction sets the historical stage by telling us that the original Fantasia was conceived as one of a continuing series of gradually evolving and changing full-length feature animations, with different versions incorporating different music and sequences. Clearly, this vision never came to fruition, except now, after 50 years.

The new segments include:

• Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, 1st movement (abstracts of butterflies; quite effective and good use of metaphor);
• Respighi's The Pines of Rome (enigmatic and surrealistic pod of humpback whales with a cute, diversionary, whale-cub);
• Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (semi-realistic Depression-era NYC, with a Walter Mitty twist);
• Shostakovitch Second Piano Concerto, Allegro (the tin soldier, the music box dancer, and the evil jack-in-the-box);
• Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals, Finale (a marvelous and truly hilarious short segment about the consequence of giving a yo-yo to some pink flamingos);
• Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance (the Biblical Noah's Ark saga, co-starring Donald Duck; this music will never again have its original connotations!, and I will forever have a grin on my face while listening to it); and
• Stravinski's Firebird Suite (ecological disaster and spring metaphor with a very attractive green forest sprite and a pseudo-Celtic stag).

Inserted in the middle was a return engagement from the original Fantasia, the famous scenes of Mickey Mouse in Dukas' The Sorcerer's Apprentice. While familiar, this sequence is disappointing as projected on the (very) large iMAX screen, where the granularity of the original negatives is all too clear. The only segments that really seemed to profit from the iMAX screen real estate were the Respighi and the Beethoven segments.

My favorite segments in this Fantasia version are the Saint-Saens and the Beethoven.

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